Ysabet leaned forward, resting her left forearm across her knee while keeping her stiff right hand tucked against her coat. “Can you come down to the basin with us?” she asked. “If the rock is already cracked beneath his platform, a body that can shift weight through stone could drop the bell cage into rubble before he finishes.”
The Unfinished One blinked two newly opened pale eyes near the top of its dome, then turned its heavy shoulders slightly toward the wet limestone wall behind it.
“Look at my back,” it said.
Chaska stepped up beside a mossy boulder to get an angle out of the mist, and Ysabet rose halfway to peer over the creature’s low spine.
Across the Unfinished One’s broad gray back and down the hollows between its false ribs, the hide had parted into a dozen shallow, brimming basins lined with clear membrane. Inside every pocket clung clusters of round, transparent eggs the size of gooseberries, bathed in a slow trickle of cold water that dripped from an overhang of black slate above the ledge. Inside each egg, a tiny silver-spined fish curled and twitched, its eyes two dark pinpricks against the pale yolk.
“Glassfish,” Osha whispered, forgetting her caution for a breath as she leaned closer. “The high-current brooders. My father’s old index said their spawning beds collapsed when the northern ice-lip shifted.”
